Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday April 23, 2011 @06:34PM
from the bring-me-a-shrubbery dept.

fysdt writes "The world's biggest retailer had been rumored to be considering dipping its toe into online grocery delivery for the past few years. The 'Walmart To Go' test allows customers to visit Walmart.com to order groceries and consumables found in a Walmart store and have them delivered to their homes, the spokesman said. Products include fresh produce, meat and seafood, frozen, bakery, baby, over-the-counter pharmacy, household supplies and health and beauty items."

I said they aren't Walmart that was supposed to indicate that Walmart is different and hence comparing it with some random other online grocery service is just silly.

http://shop.countdown.co.nz/ [countdown.co.nz] doesn't deliver to everywhere in NZ either so the "took them long enough" snipe is just stupid. Though there are more people in the service area of say Fresh Direct then there are people in New Zealand...

If one is at home most of the time than delivery would work. When I order something online and get it delivered, I can check its progress online. It tells me what day it will be delivered but not what time so I feel like a prisoner in my home until the product is delivered. I would much prefer a pick up point where I could go after an email was sent telling me it was there. The same goes for groceries, I would prefer to shop online and than go to the store and pickup my order. It would be nice if one

Grocery delivery tends to operate differently from normal online shopping. Because the deliveries are short distance and handled by the same company that are actually selling the products, it's much more like a personal courier service - they tend to offer one-hour timeslots in which the delivery will arrive. Your collection idea would work too, but I can't imagine it taking less than 30 minutes total even with a fairly short round trip; half an hour driving to the store, loading the bags, and driving home

If you've gone all the way to the store, you may as well actually go and get the stuff yourself, so you know what you're getting. Otherwise surely they've just give you the stuff closest to its expiry date.

We've got stores in Belgium that do both delivery and pickup services. They are part of the Delhaize group, active in the US under the name Food Lion. I don't know if they offer the same services there though.

Well, it probably comes down to the vehicles used, too. Fuel in the UK is - in practical terms - about half the price of the US. Yes, the pump price is higher, but most people drive much more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Asda deliver their stuff in vans about the same size as mine (well, one size up, not a lot bigger) that get about 40mpg from powerful, clean, efficient turbodiesel engines. In the US they'd probably use something with a 9-litre V8 producing about 70bhp and getting 9mpg at 40mph.

Well, it probably comes down to the vehicles used, too. Fuel in the UK is - in practical terms - about half the price of the US. Yes, the pump price is higher, but most people drive much more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Asda deliver their stuff in vans about the same size as mine (well, one size up, not a lot bigger) that get about 40mpg from powerful, clean, efficient turbodiesel engines. In the US they'd probably use something with a 9-litre V8 producing about 70bhp and getting 9mpg at 40mph.

The actual price of petrol is about four times what it is in the UK, so I blame distance, not petrol or fuel efficiency.

At least around here, Asda and most supermarkets only deliver in about a 20 mile radius.

One of the biggest downsides of ordering something from an online retailer is having to wait a variable amount of time to get your order (and having to pay an arm and a leg to get it fast). I've always thought that Wal-Mart was uniquely situated to offering online product ordering (not just for groceries) that gives you same day delivery for a relatively reasonable price. Their size and reach and efficient logistics puts them in a unique position to offer something like that, sort of a short range FedEx. I

The biggest draw is once you have used the service a few times all the things you buy are on your favourites list (or similar named equivalent) so it takes you about ten minutes of clicking to do what would take you an hour or more of driving, wandering around, trying to resists impulse buys, queuing for the checkout, more driving and unloading the car...

Given they offer pre-selected small window delivery times here in the UK (20 minute slots), I can get the delivery when I will be home anyway, that's an ho

You do realize that Amazon already provides this sort of service, right? Granted I'm sure it's not everywhere yet, but that's what Amazon Fresh does, they delivery groceries on a one time or regular basis direct to your door, and the food is usually on your doorstep when you get up in the morning.

I could see this being useful but many items in a grocery store lack the fungible nature of factory goods.
I want to see how the produce looks before I even decide fully on what produce I want, for most types of fresh fruit, fish,meat, vegetables etc

I wish there were more Aldis around. One thing I noticed about supermarkets is that they make you run around the entire perimeter of the store and then some to get the basics just so you can much more food than intended. An aldi is about 1/6 to 1/9 the size of a modern supermarket I would estimate (1/3 width * 1/3-1/2 depth). There are about 5 aisles but have what I need 90% of the time. Unlike most mom/pops or convenience stores, they're very cheap, even compared to the supermarkets. The cashiers are

When I moved out of my mother's basement I used the Albertson's delivery service until they shut it down. It was $14 per delivery, regardless of size, so I'd get all of my groceries for the month in one order.

It was a lot easier to avoid impulse buying and to plan out what was actually needed when I could place the order online. Albertson's would remember your previous order so it was easy to just adjust it slightly each month.

It was a lot easier to avoid impulse buying and to plan out what was actually needed when I could place the order online

Impulse buying groceries is a really interesting phenomenon, and something I'm very prone to myself. The question is, how does your purchasing change in the long run if you can eliminate impulse buying? There seems to be only a few possibilities: 1. You buy healthier items and aren't tempted by junk food and instant gratification foods as much 2. You buy less and throw out less food and

$14 is steep; the services in the UK (which numerous posters have already mentioned the existence of) charge about £3 to £5, which equates to around $5 to $8. Since deliveries of this type rely on a pre-existing network of stores, with small vans doing the last few miles to the home, I would think that the larger size and lower population density of the US should have a minimal impact on delivery pricing.

My line of thinking was that the distance from the average American house to a Walmart is probably not significantly greater than the distance from the average British house to a Tesco - customers have to be able to drive to either in a reasonable time, after all. While the logistics involved in getting items to the stores from central warehousing locations may be made more difficult by the scale of the US, the infrastructure delivering items from the stores would probably only need to operate within a 10-1

I enjoy grocery shopping as well, but that's in "normal" grocery stores, that I can conveniently drop into on my normal walking route.

Walmart (and other U.S. style suburban mega box stores) are different: they're truly unpleasant places, and typically require a dedicated trip to the edge of town or something. I can imagine many people would pony up some cash to get the low prices of Walmart while avoiding the depressing experience and inconvenience.

While Walmart is certainly late to the party on this one, the business implications are pretty big. They are already the world's largest retailer. They are already known for pushing out local businesses (which may be a good or bad thing depending on which point of view you are seeing). Delivery is one of the few ways that grocery stores have set themselves apart from Walmart. Is this a way for Walmart to strike out at their competition? Are they going to try to cut into competitors like Safeway and Albertson's who offer grocery delivery?
My other slightly off-topic question is: why aren't there any fast food hamburger delivery chains? You can't throw a rock without hitting a pizza delivery place (or Chinese or Indian food), but there aren't any well-known burger joints that deliver (at least, not throughout the US in all locations).

A food's ability to be delivered depends a lot on how well it handles a 30 minute wait. Pizza is okay luke warm, cold, or re-heated. Chinese isn't so great cold, but you can insulate it pretty well and keep it warm enough for arrival, same with Indian food (both reheat okay). Cold sandwiches/subs deliver fine too.

A burger, on the other hand, gets soggy, cold, and disgusting by the 30 minute mark. Fries are similar. These days most fast food places have pretty fast turnover of their fries, and within about 15 minutes of them being left out they're a pale imitation of how good they taste when you first get them. Tex-Mex is similar - tacos get soggy, so much that Taco Bell tastes much worse if you get it in the drive through and drive 10 minutes home with it.

On the other hand, fried chicken products tend to do okay with the wait time. So while we don't see very many chicken-only delivery places, the major pizza chains often add chicken wings to their delivery options.

No no NO! Walmart is good at 1 thing - selling very large volumes of low to medium quality merchandise in store. When they have tried to move away from this model they have failed - repeatedly and spectacularly. The most recent example came with a redesign of stores and elimination of some merchandise to give a more Target-ish feel. EVERYONE involved in that decision has been terminated and sales dropped by nearly $2 billion. Remember Walmart's competitor to Netflix? No one else does either. Did you know Walmart sells downloadable music? It's cheaper than iTunes and you never hear about it. Walmart went big in electronics and is now reducing that department's square footage by 2000 in each store.

Walmart's profit on sales is very low - something like 3.5% across all merchandise. Grocery items have even smaller profit margins. For this to have even a slight chance of success the delivery fee will need to be tiny as the average Walmart customer is just that cost conscious. That tiny fee could easily be eaten up given even the smallest change in gas prices. I buy nearly all my groceries at Walmart. Given the choice of a $10 delivery fee and actually going to the store I will go to the store every single time.

I live near Walmart's home office, and I have to tell you, Walmart is scared. They are entering unfamiliar territory and they do not know what to do. Other than a few isolated urban pockets, there is no where left for Walmart to expand. You can go to the middle of Alaska and there is a Walmart there. Walmart's years of explosive growth have ended. The stock price has barely budged over the last 10 years. While sales increase, the profit on those sales is decreasing. Something Walmart is trying to pilot here are stores in small towns (pop. 2500) that compete with dollar stores (Family Dollar, Dollar General). This not only breaks their distribution model (large trucks over large roads to large stores) but will drain sales from their existing large stores. Those smaller stores in smaller markets will have even smaller profit margins. Walmart isn't chasing pennies any longer, they are chasing hundredths of cents. Walmart is not innovating they are copying. This grocery delivery trial is just the latest attempt by Walmart of trying something (anything) to reverse what is in all likelihood a slow but inevitable death. Walmart isn't going away anytime soon, but they are going away.

Delivery fee is $5 is you specify a 4 hour window. It only works on volume. If you and all your neighbor order, it will be profitable. This actually is re-making me a customer of Walmart. The San Jose area only has 2 Walmarts and no supercenters. This gives me access to supercenter products without driving 20 miles. I put in my first order.

Considering the time,gas and hassle, $10 delivery fee isn't much. It can be as low as $5, which I think is worth it. Honestly if they only do this to addre

Here we have this great service from Albert Heijn (AH). I'm living in an apartment building with a lot of people, and ordering just the toilet paper online is totally worth it. But there was a consumer program called "Radar" and they had a show on the "fresh produce" problem. AH guarantees that you will have at least 2 days until the expiry date, but that makes it hard to buy for a whole week. In the shop you can - eh - shop around for the latest expiry date, but that trick does not work with an online shop

The ubiquitous delivery services in the UK seem to do a decent job of this - the vast majority of things are no closer to their use by date than I'd expect had I done the shopping myself (although admittedly if I do shop in person I don't spend time going through looking for that one container beyond all the others that won't go bad for a decade), and those that do only have a day or two are marked as such, with the option to send them back with the delivery guy for a refund.

Supermarket home delivery has been standard in the UK for almost a decade now. For £4-5, they'll deliver an entire order by truck in several crates. All the major supermarkets do this, though Asda's coverage is spotty. (Asda being of course owned by Wal-Mart!) And you don't have to journey to a hideous fluorescent-lit barn on a Saturday and want to kill every other person there.

The UK is smaller than the US, but for urban or suburban areas this sort of delivery service should be quite doable.

I had a food load for 10 people delivered to the middle of the yorkshire dales on New Years Eve, so I have a new respect for tesco's universal delivery policy. I think some of the scottish isles you'd be out of luck but it's a lifeline for remote people too!

Oh, Slashdot, while you are a wonderful waste of time normally, this time I thank you. I recently moved from the Kansas City Area (1.5 miles from a Walmart Super Center) to San Jose. Prices here are crazy and the closest Walmart Super Center is 20 miles, (10 to normal store). However thanks to Slashdot, I now know that Walmart delivers to my new address and I plan to use the service heavily. The 5.00 delivery fee is easily offset by the savings from the local stores(not to mention gas cost). My firs

Sure, Domino's claims delivery is free. But have you noticed that if you pick the pizza up yourself, it's about half the price? They don't charge for delivery, they just give a huge discount for non-delivery. I assure you, you do pay for the cost of delivery, one way or the other.

Indeed. Albertson's has an interesting idea going, they've got basically three tiers of service, do it yourself, pickup and delivery. You pay a bit to have the groceries waiting for you when you stop by, but the cost of it can be a deal if you're in a situation of having to pay for daycare for an additional hour.

Because no business has ever subsidised one product line with revenue from another. Never in all of history. A casino has never eaten the cost of a room (given free must be below what it costs to have a maid clean it) because they'll make up the loss on that product with the additional profits on another product like the gambling tables.

Which of course isn't applicable to the take-out/delivery case, but then again you spoke about general businesses. Plus of course take-out has some costs that delivery does

I hated that in the uk some restaurants put the tip right on your bill. I went to an Indian restaurant and made sure to tell the waiter no green onions, and of course my dish comes out and is covered with the things. I wasn't going to tip him but the bastard put the tip right on the bill. I guess technically I didn't have to pay it, but I just didn't have the energy to fight that fight.... Now I live in a country where absolutely no tipping is practiced, it's bliss.

I have no idea if it's different in your country, but over here in the US, we have minimum wages as well... only, employers can pay you less if you are allowed to accept tips.
Example, the pizza guy who makes the pizza and doesn't take tips? Minimum wage, $7.50 / hour or whatever MW is these days.
The delivery guy who actually takes it to your house? $2.00 / hour + tips (maybe slightly more or less than $2, I don't deliver pizza, but you get the idea).

But this is a barber. Big chair, bottles of blue mystery fluid with the combs in it, warm foamy shave cream dispenser, straight blade razor sharpener on the side of the chair. He will use the straight razor on the sideburns.

The barber's price is 1/2 to 2/3 that of a "male haircut" at a salon. Of course, the barber haircut looks pretty much always the same for everyone no matter what you "request" and it takes 5 minutes.

We don't own a car either, but we live in Canada. Almost all the grocery stores off delivery, but I'm unaware of any that do the shopping for you. We go the grocery store to pick up all the heavy items with a longer shelf life about once a month, and we get them delivered. About $8, which is quite pricey, I guess, but when you consider we're getting about $300 worth of stuff it doesn't make much difference. All the fresh stuff we pick up weekly between 1 or 2 trips to the store. Getting by without a car

So you have to go to the store and do the shopping, but then they take it to your house? You don't just order online? Or have I totally missed what you were saying?

Seems like a strange premise, at least to me. Marginally useful for people such as yourself without a car, I guess, but you still have to get a bus to and from the place, which is hardly convenient even in cities with excellent public transport. Not lugging the bags back is a small mercy, I guess, but hardly making the best use of a delivery infr

Not lugging the bags back is a small mercy, I guess, but hardly making the best use of a delivery infrastructure. As someone else pointed out, one of the biggest advantages by far of grocery delivery is the website learning what you usually order, so the whole process is done in ten minutes.

While I agree that online ordering is probably for the best, still being able to shop is probably good as well. If the customers are willing to wait a day or two you can save fuel and such by optimizing the delivery routes. Software is actually getting pretty good at it nowadays. The more people the better, of course. Sort of like how it's a heck of a lot cheaper for a lawn care service to hit EVERY house on a block rather than a house here and there - they'll cut deals of half price or more in exchange

I was thinking of it in terms of the less pedestrian-friendly US style city, as you correctly surmised, but back when I lived in London I still probably would've found such a service a little strange - if I needed a few things right then, I'd just carry them back with me; if I were doing a week's worth of shopping I'd find it more convenient to order online and have them come the next day.

I guess it works well, or they wouldn't offer the service, it just struck me as odd.

Not really news in Canada either. There's either companies that do it for you, or the stores itself do it. Then again, you jump back 50 years and you could get everything delivered too. For the last year I've had milk delivered to my house once a week. The local dairy does it here, and it costs nothing. I'm glad to see my milk box is getting a use again.

Walmart is not known for having quality food. Why is it so difficult to find a delivery service for quality food but so easy to find a delivery service from Stop and Shop or Walmart?

Trader Joe's would rather you come into the store. The food itself is only part of the experience shopping there, the demo program, employees that actually talk to you, and the generous return policy are some of the things that make Trader Joe's unique.

Disclaimer: I have worked there for 5 years, 3 in a management position, multiple stores. I can't speak for Whole Foods, but I would imagine they would also want customers to come into the store instead of just "getting the food".

Trader Joe's is a grocery store. Lots of natural and organic foods. Looking around, it will seem like a clearing house of gourmet brands as they have some things, but not everything you'll want to buy. However, shop around and they will have something you want and are willing to go there for. The brownie mix that beats everybody else's, that one snack food you love, the curry nan, that one brand of wine and cider that they carry that nobody else does, etc. all make it worth going there and picking up other

It has nothing to do with quality. Those high end grocers are running boutiques. They depend on an elitist consumer base that will try new things and incorporate them into a growing palate.

Walmart depends on people expecting the same thing at the cheapest price. They're not always cheapest but if you keep people coming back rather than running off to other local markets they have nothing to compare.

This is why there's a walmart in every small town in america. Even here in the big ol' city there's two whole

People who buy based on quality rather than price would probably want to actually see the food before they buy it. Delivery is a good way of getting rid of all the greying meat and wilted lettuces. Walmart shoppers probably wouldn't notice the difference.

Yes the do.... they wander around the store for you with a hand scanner with a screen that tells them what to pick and in the optimum order to pick it...You can also give written instructions like 'I prefer bananas that are almost going black' if you really want... which they may or may not pay attention to.

Some of the fancier systems even let you enter the number from an old till receipt and let you easily choose items from it without having to search the online store four preferred brand of hair gel

COPD. I have a friend that worked the security at one of the Supercenters and asked him that very same question. He said because he has had to call out medical help for them in the past he has found many to be COPD, and the massive amounts of steroids they give them causing them to retain weight and fluids like mad.

If you look at a shot of Jerry Lewis from a few years ago when he was being pumped full of steroids? Same look. I have seen relatives with COPD and it really is a shitty disease. A lot of constr

A lot of construction and factory workers end up with it after they retire, I wonder if it is all the plastic they breathe in.

Smoking is actually the most common cause, but working in a dirty industrial environment could also contribute. A lot of the Fatboi Skooter crowd are suffering from diseases relating to decades of food abuse and zero exercise though. Type 2 diabetes, congestive heart failure, etc. Many of them wound up that way at least in part because of chronic pain issues and greedy, incompetent

I'd say the "food abuse" as you call it can squarely be laid at the politicians doorstep. The average for disability or social security in my area is $700 a month, that's it. if they are lucky maybe $50 in food stamps. Go into your average Walmart and see what the poor are putting into their carts. it is the "tube of hamburger" and potatoes, along with white bread and sodas. They simply can't afford nutritious food thanks to the government taking food energy AND housing out of the cost of living adjustment

I'm inclined to agree with you on most of your points above, except one: I've been dirt poor before, and I ate less quantity of higher quality food. It isn't hard, really. Produce, brown rice, dried beans, even whole grain flours -- all very cheap compared to all but the cheapest convenience foods. The real trouble with the American diet today is that people are addicted to quantity, convenience, and refined carbs. I bake a loaf of whole grain bread twice a week, and it costs less than a loaf of cheap white

When I lived in NY City, I used Fresh Direct [freshdirect.com] . The prices were just about the same as neighborhood supermarkets, there was much bigger variety ( many items were not available locally) and the meats were of the highest quality and cut exactly to my specifications.